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Why only individual thinking can reunite America
Thinking in teams is destroying American life
Timothy Snyder: Well, the whole idea of best interests in the question, "Why do people vote against their best interests?" is not an objective thing in nature. It's one of the very problems in the politics of inevitability, is that we think like economists and we say, "Well, everybody is rational in the narrow economical sense, everybody knows what's good for them." And that's just not true, or rather the ability of people to discern what their interests are depends upon a process of education, which includes not just reasoning mathematically, which is very important, but also it has to include some kind of humanistic side where people learn to criticize or think critically about what they hear, learn to make distinctions among various kinds of media.
Because that notion of "one's best interest" is not at all natural, it's the product of a certain kind of education. And that kind of education can be undone, first of all it can not be done, but it can also be undone, one can deliberately appeal to the parts of the mind which aren't concerned with the future, with math, with critical thinking, but to the parts of the mind which think in terms of "us and them," "friend and enemy," and you can draw people into these cycles. And the less—and this is how it fits together with inequality—the less people see a good future for themselves if they think in terms of interests, the more they're drawn into a different way of thinking where it's not about their individual interests, but it's more about feeling like they're on the "right team," they're on the "right side."
For a lot of people in the U.S. now I think it's a little bit like they want to ride the bench for the winning team. They know that things aren't going well for them personally, but they want to feel like they're on the right side. And that helps to explain the appeal of someone like a Donald Trump who, of course, himself is a failure but has the skills to present himself as a success and can get people thinking, "Yeah, I want to be on that team. I'm not going to do any better economically, but I'm going to feel better about myself, because I'm on the winning team, I'm on what it feels like the winning team." So the whole thing about best interests has to be seen as a project.
You have to educate people, you have to take anxiety away by providing certain basic things like schooling and pensions and vacations so people can pause and think a little bit about themselves and their future. If you don't provide those basic elements of (I would say) political civilization then people are too anxious, it's hard for them to get their minds around what their interest actually are.
And beyond that if you don't educate them positively towards thinking with both math and with the humanities they're not going to get there anyway. So it's a project. A basic thing that we Americans forget—and a basic thing that politics of inevitability shrouds—is that creating the individual is a project. It takes a lot of work to create an individual. I mean we want to have thinking individuals. We want to have people who know what their best interests are. We want to have people who go thoughtfully into that ballot box, but that's a project; we're not born that way.
I mean as a father I can assure you that we are not born that way. I think it's the noblest and best thing we do, to try to create individuals, but we can't just leave it to chance, and I think that's where we go wrong. One of the basic ways we go wrong with the politics of inevitability, we think, "Okay, automatically we're going to be those kinds of rational people," but we're not automatically those kinds of rational people. I mean the irony is if you want to create individuals who can think about their own best interests you have to, as a society, say, "We agree to make it a project to educate and form such individuals."
- Inequality is the root cause of America's political circus.
- Americans are sacrificing their future for their political team
- To win against populism, foster individual thinking
Listen: Scientists re-create voice of 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy
Scientists used CT scanning and 3D-printing technology to re-create the voice of Nesyamun, an ancient Egyptian priest.
- Scientists printed a 3D replica of the vocal tract of Nesyamun, an Egyptian priest whose mummified corpse has been on display in the UK for two centuries.
- With the help of an electronic device, the reproduced voice is able to "speak" a vowel noise.
- The team behind the "Voices of the Past" project suggest reproducing ancient voices could make museum experiences more dynamic.
Howard et al.
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"While this approach has wide implications for heritage management/museum display, its relevance conforms exactly to the ancient Egyptians' fundamental belief that 'to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again'," they wrote in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56316-y#Fig3" target="_blank">paper</a> published in Nature Scientific Reports. "Given Nesyamun's stated desire to have his voice heard in the afterlife in order to live forever, the fulfilment of his beliefs through the synthesis of his vocal function allows us to make direct contact with ancient Egypt by listening to a sound from a vocal tract that has not been heard for over 3000 years, preserved through mummification and now restored through this new technique."</p>Connecting modern people with history
<p>It's not the first time scientists have "re-created" an ancient human's voice. In 2016, for example, Italian researchers used software to <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hear-recreated-voice-otzi-iceman-180960570/" target="_blank">reconstruct the voice of Ötzi,</a> an iceman who was discovered in 1991 and is thought to have died more than 5,000 years ago. But the "Voices of the Past" project is different, the researchers note, because Nesyamun's mummified corpse is especially well preserved.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"It was particularly suited, given its age and preservation [of its soft tissues], which is unusual," Howard told <em><a href="https://www.livescience.com/amp/ancient-egypt-mummy-voice-reconstructed.html" target="_blank">Live Science</a>.</em></p><p>As to whether Nesyamun's reconstructed voice will ever be able to speak complete sentences, Howard told <em><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/ancient-voice-scientists-recreate-sound-egyptian-mummy-68482015" target="_blank">The Associated Press</a>, </em>that it's "something that is being worked on, so it will be possible one day."</p><p>John Schofield, an archaeologist at the University of York, said that reproducing voices from history can make museum experiences "more multidimensional."</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"There is nothing more personal than someone's voice," he told <em>The Associated Press.</em> "So we think that hearing a voice from so long ago will be an unforgettable experience, making heritage places like Karnak, Nesyamun's temple, come alive."</p>Virus made inequality much worse across the world, says report
Inequality in wealth, gender, and race grew to unprecedented levels across the world, according to OxFam report.
A businessman walks by a woman asking for money in New York City.
- A new report by global poverty nonprofit OxFam finds inequality has increased in every country in the world.
- The alarming trend is made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, which strained most systems and governments.
- The gap in wealth, race and gender treatment will increase until governments step in with changes.
People wait in line to receive food at a food bank on April 28, 2020 in Brooklyn.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Credit: Oxfam International
Scientists find 'smoking gun' proof of a recent supernova near Earth
A supernova exploded near Earth about 2.5 million years ago, possibly causing an extinction event.
An artist's impression of a supernova.
- Researchers from the University of Munich find evidence of a supernova near Earth.
- A star exploded close to our planet about 2.5 million years ago.
- The scientists deduced this by finding unusual concentrations of isotopes, created by a supernova.
This Manganese crust started to form about 20 million years ago. Growing layer by layer, it resulted in minerals precipitated out of seawater. The presence of elevated concentrations of 60 Fe and 56 Mn in layers from 2.5 million years ago hints at a nearby supernova explosion around that time.
Credit: Dominik Koll/ TUM
I spoke to 99 big thinkers about what our ‘world after coronavirus’ might look like – this is what I learned
There is no going "back to normal."
